a beast, an angel, a madman
by slightowl
Summary: a collection of beyond birthday drabbles. (axbb, with a side of lxbb.)
1. Chapter 1

**title: **a beast, an angel, a madman

**rating**: T

**word count**: ~780

**summary**: beyond birthday, and the ghosts of wammy's house.

**author's notes**: i couldn't get this drabble out of my head, i'm sorry.

* * *

**a beast, an angel, a madman**

_"I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me." ― Dylan Thomas_

The ghosts at Wammy's are temperamental. Like the estate's electrical wiring, they flare and burn, leaving charred imprints of their bodies against the wallpaper. Their moods predict drafts that rattle through the orphanage, disturbing the termites and sending chandeliers into orbit.

The dead woman in the dining room yanks a knot from Beyond's hair, but the other boys do not notice. Beyond is not surprised. He is cursed, but in a melancholy — almost pleasant — way. Hawkmoths dive into his open palms. Toadstools sprout from his footprints in the garden. Ravens caw prophetic quatrains at his windowsill.

This ghost wears a sheer hospital gown, and her nipples show wide and violet through the fabric. Blood streams continuously from her left nostril. The ghost watches A and L eat, and tells Beyond how each of them will die.

"The blonde boy, he'll hang himself from rafters in the attic. The plan is already forming in his mind. He feels like he is sinking. Each time he looks up, he sees fading stripes of sunlight against the ocean's surface."

The four above A's head becomes a three, as L comments on the Heisenberg principle and licks peanut butter off his spoon. Lightning bugs blink in sequence through the window. Beyond slurps his soup, but they both ignore him.

"And he," the ghost says, pointing at L's explosion of hair, "He is the lucky one. He'll die in the arms of the one who loves him most."

• • • •

Months pass. Snow falls. When spring arrives, Roger tends to the larkspur atop A's grave.

Beyond finds another ghost in the library. This one has no fixed form. Beyond has found it tucked beneath the inside cover of a novel, disguised as a fleck of light. He has seen it stretched like water above the history section. Once it had been enormous, like a newborn star, devouring bookshelves. The ghost steals Beyond's pens. It flings books across the room. It annotates novels in schizophrenic handwriting.

"A?" Beyond whispers into the wedge of space between pages. The cover snaps closed, sending a whorl of dust into Beyond's face, but nothing answers.

• • • •

Beyond sometimes wakes gasping, "I want to go home."

The ghost that lives in his sock drawer curls against the cold curve of Beyond's neck. It smells of sawdust, and spends its days braiding the fringes of Beyond's aged clothes.

"You _are_ home," it whispers, which is a lie they have both agreed upon.

In truth, Beyond is fond of the ghosts. He feels a kinship with their loneliness ― with the notion that they are the last surviving members of a species surrendering to extinction, which is worse than death.

• • • •

Beyond is quite sure the thing in the chapel is not a ghost at all.

He sneaks into the building to smoke, peeling away vines that circle its tarnished doorknob. The rainbow from the rose window travels the chapel, marking the hours. The pews are florescent green. Sometimes, Beyond preaches from the empty pulpit, reciting Latin through heaving laughter.

The thing in the chapel pays no attention. It huddles in the confessional, writing in a leather book. It has the twitching ears of a rabbit, listening for a fox in swaying reeds.

Beyond tries to speak with it once.

"What's your name?" he whispers, because Beyond cannot see. He searches the air above the thing's head, but finds only a dark gap that makes Beyond feel desperate, like he is meant to reach in and pluck something out.

The thing gives a huff and keeps writing, letter after letter, never pausing to straighten its fingers.

"That power is not for you, half-breed. Go away."

Beyond senses an old truth behind its words, and obeys.

That evening Beyond finds L monitoring a kettle on the stovetop. L's sleeves are pushed up to the elbow. There are pink rings embedded in his forearms. Since A's death, L has been snappish. There is a scab over the hangnail on his left thumb.

"Go away, Beyond," L says. His tea smells like macaroons.

"That is all anyone tells me anymore."

L disappears with a teacup, and Beyond watches a spirit weave through his steam trail. Its laughter sends an odd tremor through the chambers of Beyond's spine. The dead are restless at Wammy's tonight.

"Beyond, Beyond, you don't belong," it sings, and Beyond wafts the ghost away, though he is inclined to agree.

**Fin**.


	2. Chapter 2

_|this was for a one-hour drabble challenge, and i suppose it is best placed here.|_

ii.

Each morning, Beyond's mother hobbled towards the pens carrying two great satchels of feed beneath her armpits, and when the goats saw her, they bowed. This was how Beyond realized his mother was a witch. There had been other evidence, of course, but it had fit so seamlessly into Beyond's pastoral childhood that he had not noticed the strangeness that hung above their home like a cleaver.

Their collection of plump black hens greeted the morning with the hymn of St. Hieronymus, patron of the chopping block. Beyond's mother prayed over spice cookies she baked on Walpurgis Night, and ordered Beyond to bury them beneath the yew tree in the yard. Beyond's tenth birthday present had been a speckled toad with a bell around its neck. After Beyond had smothered it beneath his pillow, his mother had cut his palm with a kitchen knife, and smeared his blood across a sprig of holly.

"You bring me bad luck," she'd said, but Beyond had already suspected that.

* * *

Beyond knew other things about his mother. She was not beautiful, but her calves bulged out of her riding boots, and she could kill a man with the weeds sprouting along their fence. Her knuckles were swollen, always. She wore her red hair in two braids that slapped against her back as she tilled soil in the field. Sometimes, men materialized beneath their porch light, thumbs hooked into their front pockets, and Beyond watched numbers bobbing above their heads from his bedroom window.

The men were from the village down Snakeroot Road, which Beyond was forbidden from traveling. His mother occasionally ventured into town, kickstarting a blue station wagon whose interior smelled like a lit match, and returned with library books, coffee grounds, and crates of whiskey. Last November, someone had spray-painted CUNT diagonally across the garage door, and their hose had only spread the letters into the woodgrain.

"It means they are afraid of us," his mother explained, without being prompted. Beyond thought they were right to be afraid. He had seen the opossums nailed to trees at the edge of their property. His mother planted railroad spikes along the path that led to their front door, and twisted by the rain, they waited for an unlucky foot in the darkness. Beyond knew he had no father, or rather, that his father had come from Somewhere Else.

"Beyond, tell me how much time I have left," his mother asked, and pressed a glass of dilute scotch against her forehead. It was a Wednesday in late summer, and the moon hung in the sky until lunch, before sagging beneath the treeline. All morning, crows had swarmed the fence posts, knocking against each other mid-air, tearing the clouds into shreds.

"Not long," Beyond said, because it was the truth, and it was dangerous to lie when crows were cooking up lightning in the sky above them. Beyond pretended he was seeping into the upholstery. He imagined his fingers tangled in the peonies of the fabric.

"What will you do when I am gone?"

A bird collided with their windowpane, and fell dead beneath the porch light.

* * *

Much later, there was a fire and Beyond's mother burned, like all witches did.

* * *

Even in Winchester, where the sky was torn away by steeples and cell phone towers, Beyond remembered his mother's lessons. He knotted a fray of A's death-noose around his wrist, and buried Roger's reading glasses beneath the rhododendron bush in the garden. He whispered messages to the wasps flattened against his windowpane, and dried bushels of belladonna in the forgotten shed behind the chapel. The day L left for London in a checkered taxi, Beyond gathered L's hair from the shower drain and tucked it into an envelope.

There was magic hidden in the folds of space, Beyond knew.

Everything was connected and one day he would burn, like all witches did.


	3. Carry the Fire

| _I am sitting in a waiting room writing drabbles about Beyond Birthday. Here is one of them._ |

**Carry the Fire**

Fandom: Death Note

Word Count: ~460

* * *

"_There is no God and we are his prophets." _

― _Cormac McCarthy, The Road_

* * *

There are prophecies everywhere, Beyond realizes.

This happens while he is crouched in the back of a truck carrying poultry across the Khyber Pass. The hens are grouped by color into wire-mesh pens that rattle each time the truck swerves around a boulder. The chickens have complicated internal politics, and disagreements often end in violent brawls. A lone claw rolls back and forth across the truck bed.

The truck's interior smells of feces, cornmeal, and antibiotics. Occasionally, Beyond presses his face against the air slits and watches bare mountains undulate along the horizon. Barbed-wire fences rust against abandoned outposts. The landscape is monochrome, aside from tattered prayer flags that connect the peaks of foothills. Each color reveals something of the future. Red for drought, yellow for hunger, white for death.

Three months ago, at a seaside café in Brighton, Beyond's tea leaves had spelled out: U R CURSED. Two weeks ago, he'd opened a fortune cookie in San Francisco that'd read: YOU WILL BURN AGAIN.

Beyond wonders if other people's lives are filled with ordinary moments, or if he is the only one that bounces from one revelation to the next.

"YOU'RE FUCKED," a chicken howls, and Beyond considers opening its throat with his pocketknife.

* * *

Six months ago, Beyond had been sitting across the dining room table at Wammy's, watching L spread honey along a slice of toast. Beyond can still taste the multi-vitamin on L's breath. L's hands had been cold enough to numb Beyond's skin, and his cells have not yet reawakened. It is a February morning. The windowpane has dissolved into white frost

"You're death date is hidden in the nutritional facts of this cereal box," Beyond says, before he realizes it is true. He presses a finger into the numbers 11504, and the cardboard splits beneath his nail. "I'm afraid it's going to be very tragic."

"Don't try to act mysterious, Beyond, it doesn't suit you," L says, and props his bare feet atop Beyond's lap.

The glowing orb Beyond sees at the center of L's chest pulses, vibrant and steady.

* * *

Beyond can't seem to escape the future, no matter how deeply he drops himself into the past. He abandons the truck sometime before the north Indian border and completes the final stretch of the journey on foot, camping in the shelter of mango orchards. The air tastes of nectar, but Beyond is kept awake by the sound of distant rifle fire and cobras sliding through the undergrowth.

"YOU CAN'T ESCAPE TOMMORROW," the thunder says, as a monsoon crawls over the mountain range.

"I can outrun anything," Beyond replies, and entertains himself by lighting matches until the rain begins and snuffs them out.

**Fin**.


	4. The Eye of a Little God

**Fandom**: Death Note

**Pairing**: AxBB

**Word Count**: ~780

**A/N:** I have always thought of Beyond as a psychopomp. (Also, Alistair = A, for the sake of grammatical sanity. Also, this is the Alistair of The Grave of Alistair Ipswich, but this does not necessarily take place in the same universe. Also, this is part of my seemingly endless series of Beyond Birthday backstory snippets called A Beast, An Angel, A Madman.)

**TW**: character death, suicide

**The Eye of a Little God**

"_I am not cruel, only truthful,  
The eye of a little god, four-cornered." – Sylvia Plath_

* * *

It is the twelfth day of autumn and Alistair won't be dead for another eight hours. He waits with Beyond in the deep yellow field behind Wammy's, watching pumpkins push their way out of the ground like hatchlings.

"Will you be with me when it happens?" Alistair asks, and flattens a hand against the base of his throat. His medallion leaves an imprint on his skin of a man on horseback sending a spear through the mouth of a dragon.

Beyond tucks in the tag of Alistair's shirt.

"I wouldn't miss it," Beyond says, and lays his head atop Alistair's shoulder. October constellations drag across the sky above them.

* * *

Beyond is privy to everyone's deepest secret. The kind of secret that is like a bone, Alistair thinks, to be carried inside forever but never seen.

Beyond clamps his teeth around Alistair's collarbone while they're having sex beneath a skylight in the abandoned observatory on the hilltop. Above them, bats wake with sonic barks that rattle Alistair's eardrums. Wildflowers sprout from the asphalt around Beyond's hair.

"Tell me how," Alistair says, post-climax. His body sinks into the fractured concrete. Beyond lays against him, heavier than his delicate frame suggests.

"That I can't be sure of," Beyond says, pushing his index finger into Alistair's belly button. "I'd always assumed it'd be a suicide."

"Yes," Alistair solemnly agrees.

* * *

They learn to tie a hangman's knot together, and attempt four before they are satisfied. Beyond examines it beneath Alistair's desk lamp and says, "Do you believe your path has been decided from the very beginning?"

"I believe in _you_," Alistair says. He pinches a blister on this thumb and it collapses beneath the pressure. Both his palms are pink with rope burn. A sob lingers in his chest, waiting for a moment to escape. He has never once cried since coming to Wammy's House. All orphans know better. Sometimes a cry attracts a friend, but more often than not, it attracts a predator.

"That's why I'll help you," Beyond says

Alistair wants to kill Beyond, and he also wants to fuck him, and he also wants to press his face against Beyond's kneecaps and say a prayer to St. Anthony, the patron of lost things.

Instead, Alistair wonders how much in his life has slipped away or been omitted, without him ever knowing.

* * *

The whippoorwills arrive an hour before Alistair's time runs out. Alistair watches them dive after moths through wispy, ill-defined clouds. His palm leaves an oilslick against the windowpane. He wonders what else will linger, after he is gone.

"The attic is ready," Beyond says, pushing his fingernails into the nape of Alistair's neck. Beyond carries his own weather with him. Storm clouds gather against their bedroom ceiling. The air near Beyond's skin smells of candlewax, electricity, and ozone.

Beyond pulls Alistair's hand into his own.

* * *

In the attic, Beyond ignites emergency candles in tin holders. They fill the space with slick, metallic light. For a moment, Alistair fears he is dreaming and that if he wakes, he will not be able to return. He verbalizes this to Beyond, who nods and smiles, in a terse, melancholy way. The shine of Beyond's eyes is hidden admist the darkness of his sockets.

"You won't wake up. I promise," Beyond says, and Alistair believes him.

They stand together for a moment, listening to water drip against bedrock in a hidden corner of the attic. Alistair can feel his heart swelling and shrinking like the dying body of an animal, punctured by a hunter's bullet.

"What if none of this happens? What if everything changes right now?" Alistair asks, staring at the noose swaying from the ceiling.

"You know that isn't possible," Beyond says.

* * *

Beyond waits for a long time and, eventually and despite expectation, the sun rises. When Beyond closes his eyes, he sees the lantern of Alistair's soul fading into the far horizon.

He squats atop Alistair's shadow, and traces its outline with his index finger.

The night shifts into a shade of coffin-black.

Outside, the whippoorwills dive after ghosts, mouths hollow and pink.

**Fin**.


	5. If The Sea Wants You

**Fandom**: Death Note

**Pairing**: AxBB

**Word Count**: ~800

**A/N:** In which, Alistair drowns. A prequel to The Eye of a Little God.

For Toxici, who requested: _Sad bb/a fic with a side of l/bb maybe?_

* * *

"If you're a sailor, best not know how to swim. Swimming only prolongs the inevitable — if the sea wants you and your time has come."

― _James Clavell, Tai-Pan_

* * *

**If The Sea Wants You**

This is how Alistair drowns:

There is a boat and it falls into the sea.

Alistair wakes in a rip current. There is water in his lungs. It sloshes with the undulations of his makeshift raft. He wretches, and a prawn falls from his mouth and wriggles back into the ocean.

Alistair's raft joins a convoy of barstools, salad forks, and limbless marionettes. His last memories are of a ship's mast and rigging ― arranged nonsensically, like they'd been tossed into the air and allowed to drop freely. Alistair's mother had been chanting "Franklin! Franklin!" which was not the name of Alistair's father, but of the yellow Labrador bobbing away in the tide.

The bell of a channel marker gives a forlorn chime from the distance. He drifts, watching his fingertips swell back into their natural shape. At times, something with fanned fins joins the procession of floating objects. Once, its body arcs above the water, slick and black, polished smooth by the wake.

Much later, there is a fishing boat, and a blanket, and buckets of writhing sardines, and men who speak the dialect of the southern provinces. There is seaweed knotted in their beards. Staghorn coral grows from their shoulders.

"_O que aconteceu_?" they ask Alistair, wrapping a yellow towel around his torso. Two tattered seagulls scream in the clouds overhead.

Alistair cannot answer them.

* * *

"How did you get here?" Beyond asks.

They are lying atop the sheets of Alistair's bed, watching the ceiling fan spin like a clock that drags time forward. Static bounces between the hairs on their arms.

"I drowned," Alistair says, because it is the simplest answer.

* * *

Alistair imagines that Beyond always been here, growing out from the rose garden, integral to the structure of Wammy's House. Today, Beyond is in the greenhouse, distributing dead flies into cobwebs stretched across its corners. He is wearing a grey shirt, sleeves gathered at the elbows. His shoes are caked in fertilizer. The room smells hot, hormonal. Alistair wonders if seeds will lodge in his pores and sprout flowers.

"What do you want?" Beyond says, dropping a sprig of belladonna into his pocket. Alistair has always been afraid of Beyond's pyramid knuckles, and the bobbing knot of his Adam's apple. Still, he reaches out and swipes pollen from Beyond's brow.

"I wanted to know if I will drown again," Alistair says. Beyond captures Alistair's hand and presses his front teeth into the tip of Alistair's index finger.

"My dear, I think you're already drowning," Beyond tells him.

* * *

Alistair feels no jealously when he catches Beyond and L tangled together behind the gardening shed. It is mid-August, the last night of the Perseid meteor shower. The sky is alight with cosmological power. Beyond's mouth is open against L's throat. L's eyes catch the distant light of debris burning through the atmosphere.

"Would you care to join us?" Beyond says, as he catches sight of Alistair crouched behind an ornamental shrub.

Alistair shakes his head, but otherwise, does not move. He feels paralyzed in the face of such enormity and power. The sky shatters into pieces overhead, and L and Beyond burn like two monoliths, fighting for gravity at the center of the universe.

"I don't think I belong here," Alistair says, but no one seems to notice.

* * *

Beyond steals wine from Roger's cellar, and they play with a spirit board Alistair has discovered in the attic. Rain shadows slip across the vaulted ceiling, alighting the space in tremulous green. Alistair stares at the extraterrestrial color of Beyond's skin.

ONE DROWNING MAN CANNOT RESSUICATE ANOTHER, the spirit board tells them.

"Oh, pay that thing no mind," Beyond says. "The ghosts here have understandably developed a taste for the morbid."

Alistair looks up and imagines the silhouettes of sharks, circling overhead.

* * *

This is how Alistair drowns:

There is an orphanage and it floods in the spring, when the jetstream drags in rain from the south. The wildflowers collapse and then suffocate. Rabbits flee waterlogged burrows, and send high yips of distress across the hills.

Alistair practices sailor's knots and listens to the orphanage creak like a ship steered headlong into unsurveyed channels. The compass on his desk points dutifully north, but the pole star remains hidden behind the storm.

Beyond kisses the first knob of Alistair's spine and anchors their bodies against the bed, but there is nothing to halt the tide rising rapidly around them.

**Fin**.


	6. a guide to the shinigami realm

_a guide to the shinigami realm_ | relevant excerpts for the melancholic traveler :

\- the air is denser than what you are used to. at times, it grows purple and heavy, and you think it might be possible to scoop a handful into your palms. when you do, its weight feels like warm pennies on skin.

\- great chunks of ruby and opal jut from the ground, untouched. you imagine this world would be spectacular in daylight, but there is never any daylight. you drop uncut diamonds into your pocket, but abandon them an hour later. the currency here is blood, not rock.

\- you try not to breathe with your mouth open. the air tastes like the moonshine you'd brewed in a copper vat at the orphanage.

\- the shinigami regard you as a curiosity and little more. you wake to find them browsing your travel journal, claws shredding the cover. one steals hair from your pocket comb. another, whose teeth reflect yellow light, asks if you've ever heard of kira, in the reverent tone of a father.

\- there was a war, you are quite certain of that. the landscape is pockmarked with battlescars and ruts. you stumble upon fields still reverberating with the snap of breaking bone.

\- in places, you hear the whistle of traffic police and streetlights gulping electricity. you wonder if you can dig your way out, and if it's better to start now, because you certainly can't go back the way you came.

\- the clouds here look like burnt patches in the sky.

\- your matches no longer work. this is troublesome, because even on earth, you felt bombarded by transmissions from the secret room in your brain. without fire, you instead spend the evening peeling your fingernails away with your teeth.

\- there is a king, the shinigami tell you, but he demands more payment than you can give. your eyes are not so special here, they laugh, and you haven't got much else.


End file.
